rgl crashes R.app in El Capitan

-----Original Message-----
From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.duncan at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 3:34 PM
To: Fox, John; r-sig-mac at r-project.org
Cc: jose.conde1 at upr.edu
Subject: Re: rgl crashes R.app in El Capitan

On 13/10/2015 3:03 PM, Fox, John wrote:

Dear r-sig-mac list members,

I can reliably crash R.app in R 3.2.2 under El Capitan with

  library(rgl)
  demo("rgl")  # a few returns

My session info:

sessionInfo()

R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] rgl_0.95.1367

I see this problem only in R.app, not when R is run in a terminal or

in RStudio.

This problem was original brought to my attention by Jose Conde (to

whom I'm cc'ing this message), who encountered the problem using the
scatter3d() function in the car package via the Rcmdr, but the problem
isn't unique to either scatter3d() or the Rcmdr. In the case of
scatter3d() the command

    scatter3d(prestige ~ income + education, data=Prestige)

which draws a regression surface, reliably crashes R.app, but

    scatter3d(prestige ~ income + education, data=Prestige,

surface=FALSE)

which plots only points (as spheres) doesn't.

I hope that this provides enough clues to diagnose the problem.

I don't have El Capitan, I'm still running under OS X 10.9.5
(Mavericks), and it doesn't crash.

Since you're using the latest rgl, you must have built it yourself --
CRAN doesn't distribute binaries for it (at least for Mavericks).  Did
you get any errors or warnings during compilation?

Duncan Murdoch